Wine 1.4 Released

vinn writes "Wine 1.4 was released today and includes support for a wide range of applications, including Office 2010. There are some major architectural changes, including a built-in DIB engine for better graphics display and a new audio stack designed around the newer Vista / Win 7 system and integrated into the native audio system. Almost every other subsystem received substantial updates, including Direct3D, the Gecko-based web browsing components, and better internationalization. The release notes contain more detail and you can download the source code now, or wait for packages to appear soon."

Comments

Blast from the past

[Picass0]

It's truthfully been ages since I've thought about Wine.

Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

Re:Blast from the past

[Geeky]

Same here. When I used Linux regularly I eventually switched to VMWare for running Windows, as Wine didn't really cut it (probably talking about ten years ago, though...).

Eventually I realised that I was spending 90% of my time using either a web browser or a Windows applications (Photoshop and Lightroom) and I might as well run Windows on the bare metal. With tools like Cygwin and LAMP I have most of what I'd miss from Linux, so I guess I've done it the other way round; made Windows more like Linux rather than Linux more like Windows.

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[Urza9814]

It depends on what you're doing with it. I used to play World of Warcraft, and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows (NOT in a VM.) And something like WoW in a virtual machine? Not gonna happen. For office apps and such, a VM will probably work fine, but for any kind of gaming, I've even found noticable lag on a 2.5GHz quad-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM running a game made for Windows 98. Wine just performs better. Plus with a VM you run into issues with keyboard/mouse capture -- you don't want to accidentally hit the capture key in the middle of a WoW raid. Or if you're using host integration so there is no capture key, sometimes the mouse won't capture right and you'll run it right through the edge of the screen or something...

I haven't used Wine in a while; I'm mostly using VMs because what I need these things for now is testing apps in various environments, which Wine can't really do -- but with all the problems I've had with VMs (mostly VirtualBox, some VMWare), I can't imagine any situation in which I would ever choose to use a VM when Wine would do the job.

Re:First Wine Post

[hairyfeet]

What's wrong with Win 7? While I can't stand Metro, thought Vista was too damned buggy, and hated the Fisher Price UI of WinXP I'd have to say I find Win 7 to be VERY nice, right up there with my beloved XP X64 and Win2K. How we lived without breadcrumbs and jumplists is beyond me, going back to any previous version now feels like going back to Win9x as losing those features really sucks.

Speaking of Win9X are they still working on a Windows version? I heard rumors a couple of years back and the one thing I miss about XP was its great Win9X support for old games. How good is Wine on its DirectX 6/7/8 support? Can it run the more PITA games like Mechwarrior 3 and i76? I really miss those games but I always end up with the "jumping bug" on MW3 and i76 has some serious timing issues if you aren't running a single core or running below 2GHz. Has anyone cooked up a "Wine in a box" LiveCD for gaming so one doesn't have to install a whole OS just to run it? How good is its hardware acceleration? I haven't had a chance to run it since I sold my dual boot XP/Xandros laptop in 09 so I'm a little behind here. Is its support for the older stuff better than XP?